Jim or Pat,
What do you make of this article? 5 years before ADSL this guy cant be serious!!
Bob
Sorry Robert This was meant for Jim Wilkinson or Pat Mudge
Tuesday March 4 10:05 AM EST
Cable Modems Promise To End The World Wide Wait
By Neil Winton, Science and Technology Correspondent
LONDON - You sit down in front of your personal computer and send an "e-mail" to a friend on the other side of world.
It's a hassle-free operation and you smugly congratulate yourself for being at the cutting edge of technology.
You try something a little more daring. Perhaps a surf across the Internet, the world-wide network of personal computers
linked by telephone lines.
Why not a visit to a newspaper on the World Wide Web such as the Wall Street Journal Interactive Edition, or the London
Electronic Telegraph? Or take at look at the bargains available from your friendly, virtual superstore.
But this time you are stymied by the Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde nature of information technology. Instead of the promised
seamless, effortless cruise for mind-expanding knowledge, you come up against the head-banging barrier of the
not-quite-ready-for-prime-time modern personal computer.
The Internet server company has responded to your call with an endless engaged signal, or has accepted your call,
switched you to the appropriate web site but given you a week old edition of the newspaper, or the wrong page, or has
taken 20 minutes to download graphics which are then sabotaged by a dropped telephone line.
The software crashes and says "fatal error 72, shut down your application or risk losing your work"
After a couple of hours of this, you are cursing the inventor of the computer and have to be restrained from smashing the
machine to pieces with a sledgehammer.
Cable modems should put an end to all that.
A cable modem links a PC to digital data, but instead of using dated telephone technology which has only limited capacity,
it links users to data flowing freely down cable networks designed to carry television programs.
This would guarantee almost instant access to information across the Internet. Even video would spurt on to your PC
screen.
Not surprisingly, this prospect has excited the cable companies, which see the prospect of juicy new revenues.
Traditional telephone companies may be twitching nervously. They had always expected to be the natural heirs to this
"broadband" technology with their Asymmetric Digital Subscriber Line which can more or less match cable modems for
capacity.
Now it seems there will be upwards of five years before ADSL is available, and this leaves the cable operators a tasty
window to maximize profits before the competition gets too hot.
"The current system is like sipping a milk-shake through a straw," said John Davison, senior consultant at high technology
researcher Ovum.
"That to me was always a deeply unsatisfying experience. You just got a restricted amount. Cable modems allow you to
drink deeply," said Davison.
According to an Ovum report, cable modem users will increase from almost zero today to 4.4 million in 2000 and to more
than 19 million by 2005 in North America, western Europe and parts of Asia and the Pacific. But growth will peak in 2001
and 2002 and then fall back as competition from traditional telephone companies and new satellite systems hots up.
U.S. researcher Forrester also waxes lyrical about cable modems.
"Cable modems deliver about one megabit per second of bandwidth in a typical installation, roughly the same as a desktop
PC on an office network. They bring immediate relief to the World Wide Wait," the Forrester report said.
The Forrester report also concluded -
-Cable modem services will be the most widely available middleband technology for U.S. consumers. By 2001, seven
million households will have signed up.
-Sheer speed and "always on-line" quality will woo consumers.
-This quality improvement will transform PC use and trigger electronic commerce.
Cable modem use will stir the cable industry, which Ovum describes as a sleeping giant.
"Traditionally, cable has been viewed as a utility, publicly owned, highly regulated, a low margin business. Cable is
moving from a simple distributive model to that of interactive service provider," said Ovum's Davison.
In Europe, France Telecom, Germany's Veba, and cable companies in the Netherlands, Finland, Sweden, and Britain are
conducting trials to gauge consumer reaction, and test for technical problems.
But this won't be a license to print money for cable operators. There are expensive technical problems to overcome, and
large investments will have to be made.
Dean Bubley, analyst at technology consultancy Datamonitor, said there are undoubted advantages from the higher
capacity, but there are impediments.
"Significant investment is required by cable companies, and there are other hidden costs. They have to recruit and train
customer service representatives, and there's the installation question. Most PCs will need to be upgraded, and that will
take an experienced cable engineer from two to four hours per household," Bubley said.
And the traditional big telephone companies will not stand idly by and watch cable companies cream off this profitable
business.
"The telcos (big phone companies) will have a strong role to play; they've been slow coming to the Internet, but they've
recently woken up to this and they're investing an enormous amount of money," said Yankee Group analyst Chris
Champion.
Datamonitor's Bubley said that by the end of 2000, about 30 million western Europeans will have access to the online
world. 27.7 million households with use either a PC or a less powerful network computer, and the rest will have WebTV -
which allows a plain old television to gain access to the Internet.
This will include about nine million with high-powered access, of which 3.9 million will be cable modems, and about three
million with an uprated telephone connection.
"The remainder will be a combination of satellite, wireless, and various other technologies that we are not even talking
about as yet," Bubley said.
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